"You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain;We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign,"
"You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain;We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign,"
muttered Bolingbroke, looking between the heads of the crowd, with scornful lip and angry eye, full of hatred for the dynasty that had shown him such scanty favour. "What a vulgar little beast it is, to call itself royal!—royal, forsooth! a twopenny German Elector transmogrified into King of Great Britain and Ireland! If ever this country was ripe for a republic, for a millennium of statesmen and warriors, 'twas when good old Anne shuffled off this mortal coil. Yet such a nation of sheep are we that we must needs import a royal family from Hanover rather than be governed by native talent!"
He turned from the curtseying truckling throng with a bitter sigh and a bitterer sneer, thinking how fine a triumvirate might have been formed in the year Fourteen, if he and Oxford and Marlborough had combined their forces. He told himself that he had been born either too late or too soon. He should have lived in the old Roman days when talent was power; or in some enlightened England of centuries to come, when all hereditary distinctions should be swept away to make a clear stage for genius and ambition.
Queen Caroline and a brace of young princesses moved about the rooms, with Lord Hervey and Mr. Topsparkle, Lady Hervey and Mrs. Clayton in attendance upon her majesty's footsteps; the master of the house proud to exhibit his curios and elucidate his pictures; Majesty showing herself supremely gracious, with a superficial smattering of art which went a long way in so charming a woman and so admirable a Queen. She had a smile for every one, kissed her hand to a score of friends, approved of Signor Duvetti's scraping on the violin, of Herr Altstiefel's organ tones on the 'cello, and of Signora Burletti's birdlike soprano in a scena of Lulli's and of Signor Omati's buffo bravura. There was a concert in progress in one of the inner apartments which the royalties honoured by their presence for at least a quarter of an hour, the princesses chattering all the time, and Princess Caroline so engrossed by the whispered nonsense of Lord Hervey, who happened to be standing behind her chair, as to be unconscious of her mother's reproachful frowns.
"I wonder whether the mature queen or the precocious princess is fondest of that man?" whispered Bolingbroke to Pulteney.
"O, the younger lady is fondest. She is romantically in love, while her mother uses Hervey as she uses all the world, for her own convenience and advantage," answered Pulteney; "yet I must needs wonder what is the charm of that sickly face and that effeminate manner, that all the women should adore him?"
"I think the charm is a kind of finnicking cleverness, a concatenation of petty talents which women understand. If Hervey had devoted himself to statecraft, he would have been a second-rate politician. His parts in great things would have seemed at best respectable; but by concentrating his abilities upon trivialities he appears a genius—and then, again, a man has but to flatter and fawn for the women to think him an intellectual giant, magnified by their vanity—just as a flea under a microscope seems a monster."
It was three o'clock in the morning, and Lady Judith's assembly was over, save for a few intimates who lingered in front of the fireplace in the hall, while the Swiss porter snored in his chair, and the last of the linkmen waited despairingly for the departure of the latest guest. A couple of chairs were waiting on the pavement outside—Lord Bolingbroke's and Lord Lavendale's. Tom Philter was the only other loiterer, and those spindleshanks of his were to carry him back to Gray's Inn Lane.
The royalties had eaten heavily and departed, much pleased with their entertainment.
"I thought the supper-table looked like a larder," said Lady Judith, fanning herself indolently, as she half reclined in a great carved oak chair. "Any one but a German would have been nauseated by such a plethora of food."
"But 'twas just what they like," replied Philter. "I saw your ladyship had all his Majesty's favourite dishes."
"I ought to know his tastes, after those wearisome dinners at Richmond Lodge, over which I have groaned in spirit on so many a Saturday," said Judith.
"Ah, I grant you, madam, those Richmond dinners are an abomination," retorted Philter, who would have forfeited five of his declining years to have been bidden to one.
"The king is as fond of punch as his lamented father, who used to get amicably drunk with Sir Robert every afternoon, after a morning's shooting in the New Park at Richmond last year, when the minister had a temporary lodging on the hill there," said Bolingbroke.
"In spite of the Duchess of Kendal and her Germans, who did their best to cut short that pleasant easy conviviality between his Majesty and Robin," said Philter.
And now Bolingbroke made his adieux, with that blending of stately grace and friendly familiarity which constitutes the charm of the grand manner, and little Philter tripped out at his heels, leaving Lavendale alone with his host and hostess. Judith looked at him furtively from under her drooping lashes, wondering for what purpose he had lingered so long. There had been no word of explanation between them since that broken appointment last summer. They had met only in public, and had simpered and chattered as if the most indifferent acquaintance. And now it seemed very strange to Judith, as a woman of the world, that Lavendale should make himself conspicuous by outstaying all her other guests.
"I have waited till the last, Mr. Topsparkle," said his lordship gravely, "in the hope that, late as the hour is, you would honour me with a few words in private."
"There is no hour in which I am not at your lordship's service," replied Topsparkle, with his airiest manner; yet there was a look of anxiety in his countenance which his wife noted.
"Is your business of such a private nature that even I may not hear it?" she asked lightly, hiding keenest anxiety under that easy manner. "Husband and wife are supposed to have no secrets from each other."
"That is a supposition which must have been out of date in the Garden of Eden, madam," said Lavendale. "Be sure Eve had her little mysteries from Adam after that affair of the apple had taught her a prudent reserve."
"Then I wish you good-night, gentlemen, and leave you to a masonic secrecy," said Lady Judith, emerging with slow and languid movements from the depths of the great oak chair, sinking almost to the ground in a stately curtsey to Lavendale, and then gliding from the room, a dazzling vision of powder and patches, diamonds and ostrich feathers, alabaster shoulders and gold brocade.
She was gone, the servants had retired, all save the Swiss porter who dozed in his chair; and Lavendale and Topsparkle were alone in front of the hearth.
"Your lordship may converse at your ease," said Topsparkle, "that fellow has not a word of English."
He employed foreign locutions at times, like Lord Hervey, a modish affectation of the time which distinguished the gentleman who had travelled from the country bumpkin.
"I am going to speak to you of the past, Mr. Topsparkle. I am here to do you a friendly office, if I can."
"Indeed, my lord, I have no consciousness of being at this present moment in need of friendly offices; nor do I think it is any man's business to concern himself about another man's history. The past belongs to him who made it."
"Not always, Mr. Topsparkle. There are occasions when the history of the past concerns the law of the land—when undiscovered crimes have to be brought to light—and when wicked deeds, unrepented of and unatoned, have to be accounted for."
"As in the case of Mr. Jonathan Wild and his young friend Jack Sheppard," said Topsparkle. "Your proposition is indisputable. But did your lordship outstay the company to tell me nothing newer in the way of argument or fact?"
"No, sir; I am here to talk to you of your own crime, committed in this house, forty years ago; suspected at the time by a town which was not slow to give expression to its opinion; confessed only the other night by your tool and accomplice, Louis Fétis."
"The hysterical ravings of a drunken valet are about as trustworthy as the libels of electioneering pamphleteers; and I am surprised that a man of the world like your lordship should concern himself with such folly," said Topsparkle. "The slander was as baseless as it was malicious."
"Yet it drove you from England."
"No, my lord; I left England because I was tired of a country in which the fine arts were still in their infancy. We have been improving since Handel and Bononcini came to London. In William's time there were not half a dozen good musicians in the kingdom. I wonder, Lord Lavendale, that you should take occasion to insult me upon the strength of a slander which I trampled out forty years ago, when my slanderers stood in the pillory."
"Mr. Topsparkle, there are crimes which never can be brought home to the evil-doers; but there are other wrongs more easily proved even after a lapse of years. I cannot prove you a murderer, though I have the strongest moral evidence of your crime: first from the testimony of your victim's grandfather, Vincenti, and secondly from the confession of your accomplice and agent. But one act in your life I can prove to all the world, if it should be necessary to show the town what manner of man you are. I can at least demonstrate your hardness of heart as a father; how you, the sybarite and Crœsus, were content to let your daughter expire in poverty."
"I have never acknowledged a daughter."
"But she was none the less your child—the child born in this house—the helpless babe whose unhappy mother you and Fétis poisoned."
"'Tis false—a vile calumny—and you know it."
"'Tis true, and you know it. Your victim is gone beyond the reach of earthly redress—your daughter has been dead twenty years; but there is yet one living to whom, ere that frail, vanishing figure of yours melts from this earth, you may make some atonement for past evil. Your granddaughter, Philip Chumleigh's orphan child, is my friend Herrick Durnford's wife. To her you may yet act a grandfather's part."
"Mr. Durnford ran away with Mr. Bosworth's daughter."
"With Bosworth's supposed daughter only. The likeness which that young lady bears to the picture at Ringwood Abbey is no accident, but the clue to a secret which my friend and I have discovered. Those letters from your confidential servant were on the person of Irene's father when Squire Bosworth found him lying dead on Flamestead common, with his infant daughter by his side."
He showed Mr. Topsparkle the letters from Fétis, scarce trusting them out of his own hand as the gentleman examined them, lest he should fling them into the fire. And then he related the circumstances of Irene's infancy: the nameless orphan and the little heiress brought up together; and how the Squire had been tricked by a malignant woman—a discarded mistress, eager to seize the first opportunity to do evil to her inconstant lover.
Topsparkle would fain have disbelieved the story; but that extraordinary resemblance between Irene and the picture was an evidence which he could scarce gainsay; while the existence of those letters from Fétis made a link between the past and the present. He had been startled and mystified by that likeness between the living and the dead; for it was something closer and more significant than a mere resemblance of features and complexion; and there was the likeness of character, the hereditary type, the indescribable Italian beauty as distinct from every other race. No, Vyvyan Topsparkle was not inclined to deny the claim of this girl.
"I have no objection to acknowledge this young lady as my granddaughter," he said coolly.
"Do you think she would acknowledge you, did she know the story of your life?" answered Lavendale. "Happily for her she has been spared that knowledge. She knows not how her mother was abandoned by you, how her mother's mother was murdered in this house, where you can endure to live beneath the shadow of your crime."
"Your lordship forgets that I wear a sword!" exclaimed Topsparkle, clutching at the jewelled hilt of his thin Court rapier.
"Keep your sword for opponents who know less of your character than I do, sir," said Lavendale contemptuously.
"You deliberately insult me, and then refuse me satisfaction!"
"I will give you the satisfaction of a public investigation of this dark history, if you choose. Your victim's grandfather, Vincenti, is in England, ready to make his statement before a magistrate."
"That is a lie—a preposterous and impudent lie!" cried Topsparkle. "Were the grandfather living, he would be over a hundred and ten years of age."
"He is living, and in full possession of his faculties, whatever may be his age. He gave me a written record of Margharita's story, with all the circumstances of her flight with you, and of her untimely death under this roof."
"I don't believe it. The fellow must have been dead and rotten these twenty years."
"Come to Lavendale Court to-morrow, and you may convince yourself that he still lives—lives and harbours a most bitter hatred of you, Mr. Topsparkle. Old as he is, I doubt if you would be safe in his company, were you two left alone together."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Not to acknowledge your granddaughter. Kindred with you can do her no honour; and it is better that she should be ignorant of the tie. But something in way of atonement you may do out of your coffers. Durnford and his wife are poor; they have the battle of life before them; and I am too near ruined to be of much use to them in the present or the future. When you make your will, remember your victim's grandchild."
"I will consider the matter at my leisure," replied Topsparkle haughtily, recovering his self-possession now that he saw there was no actual danger to be apprehended from Lavendale.
That blabbing fool Fétis was safe under lock and key, but not until he had blackened his patron's character. It was a hard thing to have the past thus raked up, after forty years: and by this man of all others; Judith's old lover, the one man for whose sake he had suffered the pangs of bitterest jealousy.
"I can scarce urge more than that on my friend's behalf," said Lavendale quietly. "Your conscience—if with advancing years conscience has been awakened—must be the only arbiter in this matter. But there is one thing I would add. Your victim, Margharita, died unavenged; your wife, Lady Judith, would not be wronged with impunity. She has powerful friends, and to harm but a hair of her head would be fatal to him who did the wrong."
"I do not require to be schooled in my duties either to Lady Judith or any one else," replied Topsparkle, livid with rage under his artificial carnation, which had been laid on by a less cunning hand than that of Fétis, and which made hectic spots upon that death-like countenance.
Lavendale sauntered to the door, taking leave of his host with a low bow; the Swiss started from his slumbers and flung open the double-doors, and the link-boys ran forward to light the last departing guest to his chair; and then the heavy doors closed with a clang; and the great house in Soho Square sank into silence for the rest of the night.
Among the habitations of eighteenth-century London, it would have been difficult to find a more dismal den than that house of entertainment which Mr. Marjory and his family kept for insolvent debtors, and which, with two other houses of the same stamp, formed a kind of antechamber to the Fleet Prison, where Governor Bambridge at this period reigned supreme. Hovels there were more squalid, rottener roofs, and darker garrets than those of Marjory, within sound of Bow bells; abodes where crime was rifer, and where midnight orgies and midnight quarrels were of a more brutal character than such as resounded under Mr. Marjory's roof-tree. But for sheer gloom, and for dulness and despair, the Marjory establishment was scarcely to be matched. There needed no inscription above the greasy portal to tell that he who entered there left hope behind him. There was an atmosphere of hopelessness in that establishment which needed no translation in words.
And yet there were rioters who drank and gamed and put on a show of joviality within those abhorred precincts; but these were only the hardened few—reprobates so steeped in vice and ignominy, that they would have made merry in Newgate on the eve of an execution.
Louis Fétis had been a dweller in that sinister abode for more than a week. At the commencement of his captivity he had carried himself haughtily enough; had blustered and swaggered, and told his gaolers that the debt for which he was arrested was but a bagatelle, which he should be able to settle off-hand directly he had communicated with his friends. He had sent a ticket-porter to Soho Square and Poland Street, with messages to his wife and to Mr. Topsparkle. There had been some difficulty about finding letter-paper, or he would have written; but he was too impatient to wait while Marjory's down-at-heel daughter hunted for a couple of sheets of paper and a pen. The reply in both cases had been in the negative. His wife could not help him; his master would not.
"You have been drawing upon me very heavily of late, my good Fétis, and I have your notes of hand to the amount of some thousands," wrote Topsparkle. "You cannot, therefore, expect that I shall hasten to your rescue, when a less forbearing creditor claps you in prison. Your house and furniture must be worth something; so, no doubt, Mrs. Fétis will be able to raise money enough to extricate you. For my own part, I am your milch cow no longer."
Mrs. Fétis informed her dearest husband, upon paper blotted with her tears, that she had not a guinea in her possession. She would have flown to him to comfort and weep with him, but the shock of his arrest had made her so ill that she was unable to leave her bed.
Fétis burst into a torrent of Gallic oaths after reading this affectionate scrawl. She was a traitress, a hypocrite, the falsest of women. She was glad to be free of him, to coquette with the fine gentlemen who frequented his house, to flaunt in brocade and powder, and gamble and drink ratafia with those middle-aged bucks who had admired her on the stage, who had watched her dancing and simpering behind the oil-lamps in a ballet divertissement.
"She is a whited sepulchre," said Fétis; and then he sat down in a dusty corner of the shabby sitting-room at Marjory's, and sobbed aloud. He felt himself abandoned by all the world, alone in his misery like a poisoned rat in a hole.
"It is not the wine-merchant," he said to himself; "'tis these two—traitor and traitress—false master, false wife. These two have plotted together to shut me up in gaol. He fears me and the secrets I can tell, and he thinks that here the scorpion cannot sting."
He asked for pens, ink, and paper, intending to pen a denunciation of his late master for one of the newspapers; and again there was a difficulty. Miss Marjory could not find a sheet of letter-paper anywhere. It was odd; but there had been such a call for it yesterday, there was not a sheet left, and it was too late to get any out of doors.
"'Twill do to-morrow," answered Fétis moodily; "what I have to write cannot be written in an hour."
He sat by the smoky fire, brooding over a letter to theFlying Post—a letter in which, without betraying himself, he should blast Mr. Topsparkle's reputation. He could not afford to speak plainly, but he could insinuate evil; he could deal in such slander as the town loved, and do infinite harm without risking his own neck.
The idea of this mischief comforted him a little; but when the next day came, he was too ill to rise from the pallet which he occupied in a draughty apartment on the first floor, where there were three other beds. It was a back room, looking into a yard, and affording a prospect of dead wall and water-butt. He was not alone in his indisposition. There was an invalid in the next bed, hidden from him by a faded old green baize curtain—a man who had been delirious in the night, but who lay for the greater part of the day in a kind of stupor. Fétis took both these conditions to be the consequences of a heavy drinking bout.
Under ordinary circumstances Mr. Fétis would perhaps have hardly been ill enough to keep his bed all that November day; but he lay there in an apathy of despair, waiting for his fate; wondering helplessly whether Topsparkle would relent, and hasten to liberate him, and whether that false wife of his would think better of her treachery, and come to his relief. He had a racking headache, and he dozed a good deal. And so the day passed.
He got up next morning, in spite of heavy head and aching limbs, and went down to the sitting-room, where he breakfasted in his solitary corner, shunning all companionship with his fellow-captives—an elderly parson, a scribbler of the Philter type, and a decayed tradesman—all equally hopeless and dismal.
"We are kept here to swell Bambridge's profits," protested the parson. "Charges are being run up against us all for our commons in this wretched hole, and still worse extortions of a so-called legal nature; and I am told there is a fever of some kind in the house, and that we may all sicken of it before we are transferred to the Fleet."
Fétis heard almost indifferently. He had entered that accursed house in a state of low fever, disturbed mentally and bodily. It seemed to him he could scarcely become worse than he was. He sat in his corner by the fireplace, sipping brandy all through the dreary winter day; would fain have attempted that letter to the newspaper, but there was again a difficulty about writing materials, and he had not strength to be persistent, and insist that he should be accommodated in that way. A lethargy was creeping over him; he sat staring at the dull fire, sometimes shivering, sometimes oppressed by heat. Next morning he awoke in a much worse condition, and could not lift his head from his pillow; next night he was delirious, and for more than a week he languished in a state betwixt apathy and raving madness; then came a lull in the fever, and one afternoon, in a lucid interval, he heard the word smallpox pronounced by an ancient beldame who had been the only attendant upon him and his neighbour; and then gradually—for there was a dulness in his mind which made him slow to apprehend anything—he began to understand what had happened to him.
He had been put into a room with a smallpox patient, and he was smitten by that fell disease. The house was infected; he had been sent there to his doom. It was Topsparkle's scheme for getting rid of a dangerous tool. The arrest had been prompted by Topsparkle; the whole business planned by Topsparkle.
He asked to see Mr. Marjory, and after much expostulation and heart-sickening delay the proprietor of the den appeared.
Fétis accused him of murder, of having entrapped an unconscious victim into his poisonous den, with deliberate purpose to compass his death.
"You have been bribed to get me out of the way," he said. "This house of yours is aguetapens;" and then he entreated that he might be removed to the Fleet prison till his debts were paid.
"You'll have first to settle with me," answered Marjory, "and the tipstaff, and the warders;" and thereupon he produced a bill of nearly thirty pounds.
Fétis had entered the house with less than thirty shillings on his person, and the greater part of those shillings had dribbled away in payment for drams. He had less than a crown left.
"Send for my wife," he screamed, "send for that cold-blooded hussy! I have a house full of furniture, I have powerful friends. Send for the Duke of Wharton."
"What, all the way to Spain? I doubt Wharton is almost as hard up as your honour, and could scarcely help you if he had a mind to it," jeered Marjory.
"Send for the Duke of Bolton."
"How many more Dukes would your worship summon? There is my little account, Mr. Fétis, and till that is squared you'll not budge. Smallpox be d—d! There's no such thing; 'tis a slander upon a respectable house to say so. Why there are but two or three pimples on your face, doubtless the result of a surfeit. Your neighbour has been down with an attack of jaundice from over-free living, but he's on the mending hand, and will be about in a few days. As for you, sir, I take it you have one of those timid constitutions that can put themselves into an ague at the slightest hint of danger."
"Send me a doctor, if you won't release me from this devilish man-trap, and send for my wife instantly," cried Fétis, in an agony of indignant feeling, fear, wrath, vengeance.
Marjory left him to rave as he pleased. He was powerless to help himself in any way, and seemed as if he had scarce strength to move. He lay there impotent and raging, like a poisoned rat in a hole, as he said to himself again; there was no other similitude that fitted him so well. And so the short winter day waned till it was growing towards dusk. His neighbour in the bed behind the baize curtain was sleeping heavily. His stertorous breathing was the only sound in the room, intolerable in its monotony. His unseen presence was the sole company that Fétis had enjoyed for the last two hours.
Suddenly it seemed to Fétis that he might see for himself what ailed the man. If his disease were jaundice, he would be as yellow as a new guinea; if it were that hideous malady which had been spoken of, the signs would be but too obvious.
Fétis gathered himself together with an effort, got out of bed, and plucked back the baize curtain.
There was a gleam of wintry sunset shining in at the window. It fell upon the sick man's face. God! what a face, seamed, scarred, ravaged by that foul disease! God's image for ever marred, humanity almost obliterated, by that dread visitation. He stood beside the bed staring at that disfigured sleeper, as if that sickening aspect had turned him into stone. Then he recoiled shuddering from that loathsome bed, the curtain dropped from his trembling hand, and he fell back upon his pallet in a mute agony of despair.
There was no longer room for doubt. He had been put into this contagious den with a deliberate purpose. This was Topsparkle's ghastly answer to his incautious menaces. He had aroused his master's suspicions, awakened his fears; andthiswas how Vyvyan Topsparkle defended himself.
He lay shivering under the dingy coverlet, his limbs like ice, his head on fire, meditating his revenge. He was not going to lie there like an unreasoning animal till death released him from suffering. He would be even with Vyvyan Topsparkle before he died, brief as his time might be.
The beldame came in presently, before he had had time to shape his thoughts. She brought two basins of gruel, and a rushlight in a great iron cage, which she set upon the empty hearth, where it looked like a lighthouse shedding long slanting lines of light over a dark sea.
"You'll not want anything more to-night, will you, good gentleman?" she asked. "I'm going home to my family, and there's no one else in the house that cares to come into this room; so I hope you'll spend a comfortable night, and to-morrow morning old Biddy Flanagan will come and look after ye again. Lord! how sweet he sleeps!" looking down at the slumberer behind the curtain. "Sure, there never was such a cure; but I'm afraid his beauty is a thrifle damaged, poor dear sowl."
"What's the hour, woman?" asked Fétis.
"Sure, darlint, 'tis just on the stroke of six."
"And quite dark outside?"
"As black as your hat, surr. God bless your honour, and give yez a good night's rest!"
She was gone, in haste to return to her brood, and to feed them with broken victuals secreted about her person at odd intervals during her daily duties. 'Twas almost as tender a thing, though not altogether so honest, as the maternal ministrations of the pelican.
Fétis dozed for a little, wandered in his mind for a little, then woke with a start, perfectly lucid, and heard the clock of St. Bride's strike ten.
No, he would not lie there like a dog. He would find a way of escape somehow.
He got up, and though he reeled and staggered for the first minute or two, while he groped for his clothes by the dim glimmer of the rushlight, he felt stronger presently—much stronger than he had felt in the morning, when he tried to dress himself and gave it up for a bad job. It was but the strength of fever, perhaps, but it served. He shuffled on his clothes and went to the door. It was locked on the outside. Then he tried the window, a rotten old guillotine sash, which opened easily and hung loose upon a frayed and rotten cord. He found a piece of wood in the fireplace, and propped the sash up before he dared look out.
His fellow-patient had been wakeful and slightly delirious in the earlier part of the evening, but had sunk off to sleep again, and was snoring heavily.
Fétis looked down into the yard, which was not more than fourteen feet below him. There was a water-butt in an angle made by the wall of the house and that of the yard, and there was a wooden pipe fixed in a slanting position to carry the rain from the gutters above to the butt below. This pipe passed within a few feet of the window, and Fétis, even at sixty-six years of age, and with a fever upon him, felt agile enough to descend by it to the edge of the water-butt and thence drop into the yard. It was a descent which a schoolboy might have made half a dozen times a day for sport. He buttoned his coat across his chest, clapped his hat firmly over his brow, and clambered out of the window, cautiously, slowly, seating himself upon the timber pipe, and letting himself gradually down the incline, hugging the wall as he went.
His slim fleshless figure and light weight served him well; he dropped from the edge of the water-butt on to the stone pavement as lightly as a rabbit; and then he had no more to do but to find an egress from the yard, which might prove impossible, and so all his work wasted. He groped about him in the darkness till he discovered a narrow passage which went under a house at the back of Marjory's, and opened into an alley. There was an iron gate which was generally locked; but fortune favoured the fugitive. One of Marjory's slipshod daughters had gone on an errand to the dram-shop in the alley, and had left the gate ajar. In another moment Fétis was beyond the precincts. He ran along the narrow court as fast as his thin legs could carry him, hearing voices and laughter in the dram-shop as he sped past its open door. A turn of the alley brought him into Fleet Street, and in his blind rush for freedom he nearly went head over heels over one of the posts that guarded the footway.
Late as the hour was, the business of life was not over. A train of heavy wagons and tired cattle choked the road; a ballad-singer was shrilling a political ballad in front of a public-house, while a roar of festal noises testified to the carousal within. A street-fight blocked the rough pavement between Chancery Lane and St. Dunstan's, much to the discomfiture of an alderman, who was being carried westward after a City dinner, in a chair guarded by a couple of linkmen.
Fétis changed his pace from a run to a walk, hurried along, threading his way safely amidst all obstacles, scarce conscious of fatigue in that hypernatural condition of his mind and body. Yet he had sense enough to know that his strength might fail him at any moment, and was on the look-out for a coach or chair.
He saw a coach standing just inside Temple Bar, hailed the driver, who was half-asleep on his box, and jumped in.
"Soho Square," he said, "the corner of Greek Street."
He had five shillings in his pocket, which would be more than enough for so short a journey. The coach rattled along the Strand in a series of short stages, having to pull up every now and then to make way for some heavier vehicle, and then by Leicester Fields to Soho Square, where the coachman pulled up his horses at the corner, as he had been bidden.
Here Fétis alighted—weak and tottering after the interval of rest—paid the man, and then crept off to a court at the back of the great house in the square—a court in which there was a private door of communication with Mr. Topsparkle's offices. This was the entrance and exit which Fétis had generally used in his attendance upon his master, and he had always carried a key to this door about his person. He had the key in his pocket when he was arrested, and he had it ready for use to-night.
He opened the door softly and let himself in then crept stealthily along a passage leading to the servants' staircase. This part of the house was a labyrinth of passages and small rooms, devoted to various domestic uses. He could hear the voices of the servants at supper yonder in the great stone hall, where they ate and drank to repletion at this hour, and where, Mr. Topsparkle and Lady Judith being out, they were riotous in their mirth, and indulged in many a coarse jest at the expense of master and mistress, and the company they kept.
It was the hour at which all the restraints of servitude were thrown off, and when men and maids romped and revelled without fear of interruption; since the housekeeper had her own evening engagements, and was rarely home till midnight; and the steward might be relied upon as drunk and speechless in his private apartment, snug for the night; while there was no likelihood that Mr. Topsparkle or Lady Judith and her running footmen would be home before three o'clock in the morning. Her evening was a progress from one assembly to another, with occasional intervals at Opera-house or masquerade. She came home worn out, and sighing over the weariness of life. There never were such dull parties; 'twas a tiresome world, and she wondered at her patience in bearing with it. And then, if she were in the humour, she would bring home two or three of her satellites, and sit down to cards and ratafia until the late sunrise shone redly through the cracks of the shutters, with the suggestion of a conflagration.
The passages and stairs were all in darkness; but Mr. Fétis knew every angle and every step. He crept to the back staircase, which wound itself sinuously upward between the state apartments and the offices, and then he ascended noiselessly to a narrow landing outside Mr. Topsparkle's bedroom. He opened the door of that sacred apartment, and went in. There was a fire burning on the hearth, and light enough to show that the room was empty. It was a small room, luxuriously furnished, the low narrow French bed draped with cut velvet of so dark a red that it looked black in the firelight. A great fur rug lay in front of the bed, and an immense armchair, with wings at the sides to screen off the draught, stood by the fireplace. A little spindle-legged tea-table, and an Italian coffer upon carved legs, completed the furniture.
Three choicest gems of Italian art, a Carlo Dolci, a Leonardo, and a Titian—cabinet pictures all of them—adorned the walls, and a Venetian mirror in a carved ebony and silver frame hung above the mantelpiece.
Fétis squatted in front of the fire and warmed his aching limbs. One of his shivering fits came upon him as he sat there, and his teeth chattered; but the fever was soon upon him again, and then he left the fire and lay down on his master's bed, defiling the embroidered Indian coverlet with the dust and grime of the street. It was a masterpiece chosen by Lady Judith at the India house where she spent so much money and wasted so much time; a rendezvous and gossiping place for her idlest acquaintances; a resort where reputations were murdered daily in the politest fashion, and where modish women envied and hated each other with unvarying civility.
Fétis lay on those Oriental roses and lilies, staring at the fire, wondering what Mr. Topsparkle would think were he to come in and find him there. But he did not intend to be discovered immediately. He meant to hide himself in that luxurious bower, to rise up like a spectre before his guilty master. There was a narrow space between the bed and the wall, just large enough to accommodate Fétis, and into this gully he slipped presently when he heard approaching footsteps, and lay there among the voluminous folds of the velvet curtains, warmly and even luxuriously lodged.
Here he slept the sleep of exhaustion. It was daylight when he awoke: the fire was still burning, had been tended by the slave who kept watch in the great house o' nights.
Fétis could hear the light fall of wood ashes in the grate, and the monotonous breathing of his slumbering master.
He crept out from his hiding-place, and went round to the hearth. He seated himself in the deep armchair, warmed his aching limbs at the fire, and waited for his master's awakening.
He had slept long and profoundly, but he was unrefreshed by his slumbers. He drained a carafe of water that stood on the table by the bed, and sat waiting and shivering.
The clock struck eight, and Mr. Topsparkle stretched himself and rubbed his eyes. However late were his revels over-night, he invariably awoke at this hour. It was his habit to lounge in bed for an hour or two after that awakening, while the day was airing; but his slumbers were generally over with the stroke of eight.
His first glance was at the fire, to see that his slaves had not neglected him, for the nights were chilly. Gazing dreamily at the burning logs and sea-coal, straight in front of him, Mr. Topsparkle was unconscious of that small slender figure beside the hearth, almost hidden by the side-pieces of the easy-chair. But as consciousness became keener in the newly awakened senses, as the passage from dreams to waking became complete, Mr. Topsparkle's instinct told him that he was not alone. He looked round the room nervously, saw that figure in the chair, the ghastly face covered with pustules, and gave a shriek of absolute terror.
"'Tis a ghost," he muttered, after the first shock, "Fétis's ghost!"
"'Tis stern reality, Vyvyan Topsparkle, 'tis the pestilence that walketh at noonday. You sent me to an infected den, of malice aforethought, planned to trap me like a rat; sent me to die and rot there, lest this tongue of mine should tell how you tempted me to give your mistress her last sleeping draught when you were alike weary of her charms and doubtful of her fidelity. You meant to make a swift end of a foolish babbler whose awakened conscience threatened your safety. But 'twas not so easy as you thought. I have brought contagion to your own couch, the venom of virulent smallpox has poisoned your pillow. I lay for an hour upon your bed last night before you came to it. Your down coverlet is tainted by my breath, your satin and velvet are reeking with infection. I slept beside you all night. 'Twill be a miracle if you escape the disease."
"You are a maniac," cried Topsparkle, "a malignant maniac; and I will have you clapped in a strait-waistcoat before this world is an hour older."
He lifted his arm to ring for aid, but the bell-pull had been plucked down by Fétis over-night.
"You have trapped me once," said the valet. "You shall not catch me so easily again. If I am to die, it shall be in my own hole, not in a trap of your choosing."
He opened the door and was gone before Mr. Topsparkle, helpless in the elegant disorder of his night raiment, could attempt to detain him. He fled with swift footsteps from the house which had been the scene of murder forty years ago, and which had been hateful to this cowardly sinner ever since. Topsparkle was a bolder villain, and was not open to such influences.
A week later, everybody at the Court end of London was talking of poor Mr. Topsparkle, who was stricken with smallpox, a malady which at his age was likely to be fatal, despite the assiduous attendance of fashionable physicians, learned in the latest treatment of this terrible disease.
People talked even more of Mr. Topsparkle's wife, who, with heroic self-abnegation, had insisted upon nursing her husband. She had shut herself up in his room with the sufferer, and never left that tainted atmosphere. She had been inoculated three years before, at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's entreaty, submitting to the operation rather in sport than in earnest, to please that clever eccentric, whom she loved partly for the lady's own merits, and partly because she was related to Lavendale. She had suffered a slight attack of the disease, which her splendid constitution and high spirits had thrown off as lightly as if it had been but a fit of the vapours. And now, armed by this preparation, she took her seat fearlessly beside her husband's pillow; she ordered the servants in their goings to and fro between the sick-room and the outer world; she watched day and night, and took care that not the slightest detail in the regimen prescribed by the physicians should be neglected. She performed the duties of sick-nurse as one who had a natural genius for the task.
One night, in an interval of consciousness after a period of delirium, Mr. Topsparkle took his wife's hand in his, kissed it, and cried over it, and thanked her feebly for her devotion.
"I never expected that you would be so good to me," he faltered. "I know you never loved me."
"I owe you something for your indulgence," she answered gently. "You rescued me from genteel poverty; you let me waste your money as if it were water; and I have scarcely been grateful. I think it was less my fault than that of the world in which we live. It would have been so unfashionable to be grateful or over-civil to my husband," with a sardonic smile. "But now you are ill, I feel that I may do something to prove that my heart is not the nethermost millstone."
"And when I am dead you will marry Lavendale."
"O, but you are not going to die this bout. You are better to-night. Dr. Chessenden told me this morning there was a change for the better."
"Would I could feel it! But I don't, and I doubt the end is near. And when I am gone you will marry Lavendale."
"He was my first love," she answered gravely: "be assured I shall marry none other."
"Well, I won't begrudge you your happiness. When my dry bones are mouldering in the dark it can make but little difference to me. You will have wealth enough to please yourself in a husband or any other whim. I made my will a week ago, and left you three-fourths of my fortune. The remaining quarter goes to a person who is represented to have a claim upon me."
"You are too generous; but, indeed, I have no desire for inordinate wealth."
"Nay, but you have a very pretty talent for spending. You will not discredit your position as Crœsus's widow any more than you have done as Crœsus's wife. There, there, Judith, I forgive all your follies. You have given me a good deal of pain at odd times by your flirtation with Lavendale; but, on the whole, I have been proud of you."
He lay muttering little speeches of this kind at intervals all that night; kissed his wife's hand ever and anon with maudlin fondness; was declared by the physicians next morning to be convalescent; and three days afterwards was dead; just a week after his valet had been buried in the churchyard of St. Giles's in the Fields.
Vyvyan Topsparkle's funeral was the most splendid function of the funereal kind that had been seen in London since the burial of the Duke of Buckinghamshire, and the most distinguished assemblage of mourners that had followed a hearse since the great ones of the land bore Sir Isaac Newton's pall, and followed genius and philosophy to the grave, a few months before. As that frivolous great world had done reverence to intellect, so now it did homage to wealth and fashion. Mr. Topsparkle was buried in the family vault in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, where the bones of his father the Alderman had been laid five-and-forty years before, in a sarcophagus of Florentine marble, sent from Rome by his dutiful son. The plumes, the sable horses, the mourning chariots, and procession of hireling mourners, the long train of fashionable carriages, made a striking impression upon the crowd in the Strand and Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's Churchyard. Nor was Lady Judith, in her sable robes, the least imposing figure in that stately ceremonial. Calm and dignified in her sober bearing, affecting no false hysteria of grief, but shedding a womanly tear or two for poor humanity at those pathetic words, "Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery," she won the sympathy and admiration of all who looked upon her.
"I protest she is the most beautiful woman in England," said Bolingbroke to Pulteney, as they stood side by side in the shadowy crypt.
"And the richest, Harry. Are you not almost sorry you are married—though 'tis to the most charming woman of my acquaintance?"
"Faith, Will, yonder handsome widow would be a glorious chance for a greater man than your humble servant, and my admiration of her only stops short of passionate love. Her money would have been my salvation; for I confess my own fortune has dwindled atrociously since I bought Lord Tankerville's place, and turned gentleman farmer; and my father's unamiable pertinacity in living might force his son to an untimely death in a debtors' prison, were there no such thing as privilege."
Mr. Topsparkle had been buried more than a month, and the old year was waning. The logs were piled in the capacious fireplaces in saloon and dining-room, library and panelled parlour, at Lavendale Manor. The old servants were in new liveries; and such a store of provisions, butcher's meat and poultry, game and venison, eggs and butter, had been laid in to fill the great stone larder as would have afforded material for feasting upon a Gargantuan basis. Wax candles burnt merrily in all the lustres, and set the crystal chandelier-drops trembling; holly and yew, laurel and ivy, with waxen mistletoe-berries lurking in sly corners, adorned hall and dining-room, staircase and corridors; and there was a bustle and a movement through the old house such as had never been known there since the early years of the late lord's married life, when the great Whig leaders, Somers, Sunderland, and Godolphin, with all their following, had been entertained at the Manor.
It was like the awaking of Sleeping Beauty's palace, after its century of stillness and slumber: only this time it was the princess, and not the prince, who was coming. It was not his bugle-horn, but her magic touch, which had scared the mice and the spiders, and startled the old seneschal from his torpor, and set the logs blazing, and filled the larder, and brought out the choice old wines from the cobweb-wreathed bins, and sent the sparks dancing up the chimneys, and made life where death had been.
Lady Judith Topsparkle was coming to spend her Christmas at the house where she was to be mistress, so soon as she and Lavendale should be married. They were not going to defer that happy day over-long out of respect for the dead, or out of deference for the opinion of the polite world, which was tolerably used to having its codes and customs set at naught in that merry era, and might be said to be hardened and scandal-proof.
"Let it be soon, love," he had said; and she had not gainsaid him. They meant to be married very quietly, and then to scamper off to the Continent, and rush from one old city to another all along the sunny south of France, and then drop down to the Mediterranean, and loiter on that enchanted shore till the fierce breath of summer drove them away; and then to Vienna, that enchanted city in which Lavendale and Wharton had led so wild a life, and onward to the Austrian Tyrol in quest of solitude, and mountain breezes cooled by the breath of the glaciers in that wild upper world where only the herdsman's hut suggests human habitation, and where the vulture and the eagle are easier to meet than mankind.
"Let it be soon," he said, as he stood with her in the house whence her husband's coffin had not long been carried; and she, with her white arms wreathed round his neck, as on that night years ago in the Chinese tent at Lady Skirmisham's ball, had answered tearfully, with a sad frankness which had a touch of despair in it,
"It shall be when you will, love. I care nothing for the world, nothing for any one in this world or beyond it, except you. And you are looking so ill! I want to be your wife, that I may have the right to take care of you."
"A poor prospect for youth and beauty and wit and fashion, my dearest," he said, smiling down at her upturned face with love unutterable in his own. "You have had to bear with an old husband, and now can you put up with an ailing one? I think I am more infirm than Mr. Topsparkle, in spite of his threescore and ten. But indeed, love, I mean to reform—to forswear sack and live cleanly; or, in other words, to take good care of my life now it is worth keeping. I want to be sure of long years, love, now I am sure of you. I feel new life in my veins as I stand here with those sweet eyes looking up at me, full of the promise of bliss. Yes, dear love, I will defy augury. Why should I not be happy?"
Why not, indeed? He asked himself the same question on this Christmas Eve, in the winter gloaming, in front of the great hall fire which roared so lustily in the wide chimney, and sent such a coruscation of sparks dancing merrily up to the cold north wind, that it was hard to be gloomy face to face with such a companion: hard to be gloomy when she whom he loved was coming to be his Christmas guest, to stay with him till the turn of the year; then back to the haunted house in Soho for but one night of lonely widowhood; and on the next morning they two were to meet quietly, unknown and unnoticed, at St. Anne's Church, there to be made one for ever.
She was coming. Herrick and his young wife were there to receive her. She was to bring her own little retinue: Lady Polwhele, and the Asterleys, and a certain Mrs. Lydia Vansittart, a young lady of good birth, small fortune, and easy manners, whom Lady Judith had taken up of late as companion and confidante—a woman of fashion must always have some one of this kind, an unofficial maid of honour, who retires at intervals, like the real article, to make way for a successor, and, unlike the official damsel, is not always certain of returning to her post.
Lavendale was not an admirer of Lady Polwhele, nor of her led captain and his buxom wife, and indeed wondered that his mistress should keep such company; yet at the least hint from her he had hastened to invite them, and was ready to pay them all the honours of a sumptuous hospitality. Mrs. Vansittart he thought a harmless young person, but brazen, after the manner of damsels at the Court end of town. The author ofGulliverhad talked of her openly as an insolent drab, but "insolent drab" with the Dean of St. Patrick's was sometimes a term of endearment.
Lord Bolingbroke had promised to spend a day or two at the Manor before the turn of the year, to inspect the home-farm, and compare its old-fashioned neglect with his own new-fangled improvements at Dawley.
"We will quote Virgil to each other, and fancy ourselves farmers," he said, when he accepted the invitation. "Perhaps I may bring friend Pope in my coach, and be sure those keen eyes of his will be on the watch for a trait of character in every particular of your existence—will hit off your house and park, your table and friends, in lines that will be as sharply cut and gracefully finished as a Roman medal."
Every bedchamber of importance in the rambling old house had been swept and garnished for distinguished guests. Irene and the housekeeper had roamed in and out of the rooms, and up and down the corridors again and again, before it had been decided which were to be my Lord Bolingbroke's rooms, and whether the bedchamber with the butterfly paper would be good enough for the poet.
"Be sure he will put you into one of his satires, if you lodge him ill, Mrs. Becket," said Irene: "they say he is as malicious as he is clever, and loves to lampoon his friends."
"Lord, madam, I'm no friend of his, so perhaps he'll let me alone," said the housekeeper; "but I shouldn't like to show disrespect to a famous poet. I only wish it was Dr. Watts or Mr. Bunyan that was coming: the best room in the house wouldn't be good enough for either of those pious gentlemen," added the simple soul, who knew not that both her favourite authors were defunct.
And now it was nearly dark on Christmas Eve, and the clatter of Lady Judith's coach and six might be heard at any moment in the avenue. She and her party were to have dined early in London, and to arrive at the Manor in time for a dish of tea, and a substantial nine-o'clock supper of beef and turkey. The Indian cups and saucers, the melon-shaped silver tea-kettle, the dainty little teapots, and coffee-pots, and chocolate-pots, and those miniature silver caddies, in which our ancestors hoarded their thirty-shilling bohea, had all been set out in the saloon under Irene's superintendence; and Irene herself, in a rustling sea-green brocade, and her unpowdered hair turned up over a cushion, and her dark eyes full of light, looked as fair a young matron as any mansion need boast for its mistress.
Herrick, standing with his back to the fire, and his hands clasped behind him in a lazy, contented attitude, watched his wife in the light of the candles, as she moved to and fro in a restless expectancy: watched, and admired, and smiled with all a young husband's fondness, marvelling even yet that this beauteous, innocent creature could verily belong to him.
These two were alone together in the saloon, but Lavendale stayed without in the firelit hall, brooding over the fire, and waiting for the coming of his love.
"Why should I not be happy?" he asked himself. "Why should I not live to taste this golden fortune that Fate has flung into my lap—at last! at last! A broken constitution can be patched up again. A heart that has taken to irregular paces can learn to beat quietly in an atmosphere of peace and joy. I have burnt life's candle at both ends hitherto. I must be sober. Shall I despair because of that mystic warning, which may have been, after all, but a waking dream? Yes, Iwillbelieve that sweet sad voice—my mother's very voice—was but a supreme effect of a fevered imagination. I know that I was not asleep when I saw that luminous figure, when I heard that unearthly voice; but there may be a kind of trance in which the mind can create the image it looks upon, and the sound that it hears. Hark, there are the horses! She is here, she is here: and where she is death cannot come."
The clatter of six horses upon a frost-bound drive was unmistakable. There were a couple of outriders, too, and Captain Asterley was on horseback, making nine horses in all. The footmen ran to fling open the hall-door, the butler came to the threshold, Herrick and Irene appeared from the saloon, and Lavendale went out into the dusk, bare-headed, to receive his mistress. She was scarce less eager than her lover. She flung open the coach-door before footmen could reach it, and sprang almost into Lavendale's eager arms. She wore a wide beaver hat with an ostrich plume, and a long velvet pelisse bordered with fur, like a Russian princess. She was flushed with the cold air, and her eyes sparkled; never had she looked lovelier.
"Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear!" cried Lavendale, kissing her audaciously before all the world, and then holding out a hand to Lady Polwhele, who was closely hooded, and whose white-lead complexion looked ghastlier than ever where the cold had turned it blue. "What ample provision hast thou made against Jack Frost, love! Have you borrowed Anastasia Robinson's sables?"
"Do you suppose nobody but a soprano can wear a fur-trimmed coat?" she asked gaily. "I bought this yesterday, and I can tell you that it is handsomer than anything Peterborough ever gave his wife. They say she is really married to him, and she and her mother are established in his house at Parson's Green; but he has sworn her to secrecy, and won't even let her wear her wedding-ring."
"He is a fool," answered Lavendale, "and his pride is of the basest quality. King Cophetua was not ashamed of his beggar-maid. He knew his own power to exalt the woman of his choice. Mrs. Robinson is only too good for Mordanto, who will be half a madman to the end of the chapter. Welcome to Lavendale Manor, my northern princess. 'Tis but a faded old mansion for you, who are used to such splendours—"
"Do not speak of them," she said hurriedly, "forget that I have ever known them. Would to God my own memory were a blank! Ah, there is your young friend Mrs. Durnford smiling welcome at me, and her clever husband, too;" and Lady Judith ran into the house, and was presently embracing Irene, whom she had not seen since last winter.
Lady Polwhele and the two other ladies had stayed by the coach all this time, squabbling with the two maids, who had travelled in the rumble, and who were broadly accused of having left nearly everything behind, because this or that precious consignment could not be produced on the moment.
"I feel certain my jewel-case is lost!" exclaimed the Dowager, "and if it is I am a ruined woman; for it contains some of the very finest of the family diamonds, which are heirlooms, and must be given up to my son's wife whenever he marries. I wouldn't so much have minded my own rubies and emeralds, though the ruby necklace is worth a small fortune; and to think that careless hussy should have forgotten where she put it!"
"Indeed, your ladyship carried it to the coach—nay, 'twas Captain Asterley carried it, and your ladyship ordered where it was to be put."
"Ifackens, so I did, wench!" cried the Dowager, who was very vulgar when she was in a good temper. "'Tis on the floor of the coach, Lyddy, and I had my feet on it all the way down. Lord, what a no-memory I have, child!" tapping Mrs. Lydia Vansittart archly with her fan, and ignoring the falsely-accused abigail, who stood by with an aggrieved countenance.
"I rejoice to hear your ladyship's memory is bad," said Lavendale, approaching the group with his courtly air, at once debonair and stately, "for in that case I dare hope you will forget the poverty of your entertainment at Lavendale Manor, and remember only how enchanted its master was to have you under his roof."
"Poverty, my dear Lavendale! Your house has a delightful air, and I am going to be ravished with everything I see in it. There is nothing so agreeable, to my ideas, as a fine old mansion which time has sobered down to a prevailing sombreness—the mellow colouring of centuries. I hate your newly-built and newly-appointed house, with its Italian pediment and marble floors, and its draughty comfortless rooms. Give me a house that my ancestors have aired for me. A man who inhabits a house of his own building must feel like Adam, as if he had never had a father."
They were all in the hall by this time, and Lady Polwhele was warming her feet, which were one of her good points, at the log fire, turning about the little velvet slippers with a coquettish air, now making a Bristol diamond buckle flash in the firelight, and now bringing into play an instep exaggerated by a three-inch heel.
Lady Judith had flung herself into a chair, and had thrown off her hat carelessly, letting the loose disordered hair fall as it would about her face and neck. She had unfastened the fur-trimmed coat, revealing the snowy whiteness of swan-like throat and bust, and the glitter of a diamond cross, half veiled by a cloud of Mechlin lace. She was leaning back in her chair, sipping a cup of tea, which Irene had just brought her from the saloon, and looking admiringly round at the old hall, with its family portraits and family armour and floodtide worn last at Sedgemoor, and dusty with the dust of a generation.
The other three women crowded round the fire, Captain Asterley with them. His City wife had seen a good many grand houses since her marriage, and would not commit herself by admiring this one, lest it should be supposed she was overawed by its grandeur.
"There was a turn of the road in your park that reminded me of Canons," she told Lavendale.
"My park is but a paddock when compared with the Duke's demesne, my dear Mrs. Asterley; but I am flattered that even a branch of one of my trees should recall that splendid seat. Did you stay long at Canons?"
"N-no, not very long," faltered Mrs. Asterley, who had been admitted to the ducal palace by a side-wind of favour, to see the pictures.
Mrs. Vansittart was in raptures with Lavendale Manor. She affected a kind of hoydenish enthusiasm, rode to hounds, adored the country, pretended to know a great deal about farming, and was altogether of a masculine type of young lady.
"I hope there will be some fox-hunting while we are with your lordship," she said, "and that you can find me some kind of creature to ride. I am not particular; anything, from a Godolphin colt to your bailiff's gray Dobbin, will suit me."
"We will try to find you something better than gray Dobbin, if even we cannot promise you the Godolphin blood," answered Lavendale pleasantly. "If the frost grows no harder, the hounds will meet on Flamestead Common early on Boxing Day; but I fear you will have a good many of the rabble out that morning to follow on foot."
"O, I do not mind the rabble. I am a Republican, and admire old Noll Cromwell better than any hero in history, though he was hardly personable enough for me to be in love with his shade. It has always been a wonder to me that we did not make an end of kings and queens altogether when good Queen Anne died. Instead of making all that fuss about Settlement and Succession, the Whigs should have taken the government into their own hands, elected Robert Walpole as their head, and carried on the affairs of the nation as easily as the Lord Mayor manages the City. Was ever anything so preposterous as to send for an elderly German, who knew not one word of our language, to rule over us, just because he was a lineal descendant of King James I.?"
"O, but we couldn't get on without a king," cried Mrs. Asterley. "I love the look of the King's gilt coach and eight, or his gilt chair, with six footmen walking in front, and a body of soldiers behind. 'Tis one of the prettiest sights in London. And would you have no Drawing-rooms, and no birthnight balls, and no illuminations, and no trumpeters, and no beefeaters, when the King goes to the play?"
"We should get on just as well without any such raree-shows," said Mrs. Lydia contemptuously. "Give me a Roman Forum and Consuls elected by the people."
"Nay, child, I'm sure the Romans were no better off than we are, from anything I can hear of their Neros and their Caligulas," protested the Dowager; "and I quite agree with Mrs. Asterley that a Court is an indispensable institution. We must have somebody to make a fuss about, and though I allow that Germans are mostly savages, I am sure Queen Caroline is the nicest woman I know."
"Say that she is a great deal too good for her boorish husband, and we will all be of one mind with you," said Lady Judith; and then there was a move to the saloon, where every one clustered round the table, and where tea, coffee, chocolate, cakes, and toast were discussed with considerable gusto by people who had dined at two o'clock.
Judith was altogether the queen of the friendly little party. Lavendale helped her to take off the great sable-bordered pelisse, and she emerged from her furs in a gown of black brocade, which intensified the dazzling whiteness of neck and arms, and a black satin petticoat embroidered with silver. Her only ornament was a large diamond cross, tied round her neck with a broad black ribbon, but the diamonds were as magnificent as any to be seen in London.
"Was it not that cross which the Queen wore at her coronation?" asked Lady Polwhele, screwing up her wrinkled eyelids to peer across the table at the gems.
"I believe this was one of the trifles which her Majesty did me the honour to wear on that occasion," answered Judith carelessly.
"I wonder she gave it back to you; I wouldn't, if I'd been Queen of England. You should have sued me for it."
"I don't believe Judith would ever have found out her loss," said Mrs. Vansittart: "she has a plethora of gems. She lets me blaze in borrowed splendour sometimes, but I take no pleasure in my finery. 'Tis the sense of possession that is the real delight."
"Ay, I know that by sad experience," said the Dowager. "I detest the family diamonds because I know I shall have to see them worn by somebody else, if I live long enough. When I see Polwhele flirting with some scraggy minx, I fancy how she would look with my collet necklace on her bony neck. And he is such a weak young simpleton that I never see him civil to a young woman without expecting to hear next morning that he has proposed to her."
"I don't think your ladyship need anticipate immediate peril," said Asterley, with a significant air. "From the kind of life his lordship has been leading of late, I should think there was nothing further from his thoughts than matrimony. A young man cannot marrytwoFrench dancers; and from what I know of the ladies with whom Lord Polwhele has been seen about town lately, if he marries one 'twill be at the risk of getting shot or stabbed by the other. O, I don't mean that the lady would murder him herself. She would get some serviceable Irish captain to invite him to a meeting in the Five Fields or at Wormwood Scrubs."
"You have no right to talk of such things, Asterley, and in the hearing of a mother!" whimpered the Dowager.
"I beg your ladyship's pardon; but when all the town knows the story—"
"The town reeks with malicious inventions," said Lavendale lightly. "I daresay young Lord Polwhele is not a whit worse than his neighbours."
Lady Judith leant back in her chair and listened with a supercilious air, as if she had been looking on at a gathering of ants and emmets. They sat and babbled about their acquaintances: how he or she had run mad, and how people did such monstrous stupendous things that it was strange no fiery rain came down from heaven, or inward convulsion upheaved the earth, to wreak the vengeance of the Omnipotent on this modern Sodom. Lady Judith listened, and said scarce a word. Of course the world was wicked; she had known as much from her childhood. She had heard of gambling debts and family quarrels, elopements and suicides, madness, scrofula, hereditary hatreds, and fatal duels, in her nursery. There was nothing new in the latest scandal, only another turn of the old figures in the old kaleidoscope. She heard and smiled.
"My dear souls, how stale your talk is!" she said at last: "not one of your scandals has any originality. They sound as if you had adapted them from the French. They are reminiscences of the Regent and hisroués. Confess now that they are stolen from the Philippiques."
"May I show you your rooms, ladies?" said Irene, "and then we might have time for some music before supper."
"O, hang music!" cried Miss Vansittart. "We have music enough in London. 'Tis nothing but talk of Cuzzoni and Faustina, Handel and Bononcini, all day long; everybody fighting for his or her favourite singer: and 'tis dangerous to confess one admires Senesino, lest one should be torn to pieces by the votaries of Farinelli. Let us clean ourselves, and then sit down to a good round game—bassett, or pharaoh."
Durnford rang the bell, and the housekeeper came with a couple of maids, carrying wax candles; and the ladies gathered up their cloaks and hoods, and prepared to be ushered to their several rooms.
"One word, Lavendale," cried the vivacious Dowager, wheeling suddenly on the threshold: "is there a ghost?"
"There is the ghost which appeared to Saul, madam, in the twenty-seventh chapter of the first book of Samuel."
"Pshaw, coxcomb! you know what I mean. Is this fine old house of yours haunted? It ought to be, if you lay claim to respectability. Have you ever seen a ghost within these walls?"
"Not one, your ladyship, but a hundred. The ghosts of lost hopes, the ghosts of good resolutions, the phantom of my boyish innocence, the shadow of my wasted youth, the spectre of my dissolute manhood. These rooms were full of ghosts, Lady Polwhele, till this dear lady," taking Judith's hand and kissing it, "exorcised them all by her magical presence. You will find no ghosts to-night. Love has laid them."
"Au revoir, Count Rhodomont: I think that should be your name," said the Dowager, as she skipped lightly off, followed by the other women.
Everybody was delighted with everything: the rooms, the fires, and bright clusters of candles, shining upon old Venetian looking-glasses in silvered frames; the oak passages, which would have seemed gloomy enough had the house been dark and empty, but which were now lighted by wax candles in polished brass sconces, and garnished with garlands of evergreens.
There was an air of Christmas gaiety and gladness throughout the house.
"And yet I am convinced there is a ghost," protested Lady Polwhele.